Originally Posted by
NYC Flyer
I'm thinking the roll-out of PE in the premium transcon market will be accompanied by a review of the upgrade benefit/process for relevant routes that might not have been worth the effort when domestic PE was limited to select Hawaii/Alaska routings.
I'm cautiously optimistic AA won't unilaterally do anything drastic like only doing upgrades to PE:
- United upgrades to a transcon lie-flat aren't complementary and require an instrument like an upgrade certificate or miles. But you could use an earned RPU (a regional instrument) or now PlusPoints (a short-haul amount) to upgrade to a transcon lie-flat; it didn't require a GPU (SWU equivalent).
- DL had complementary upgrades to transcon DeltaOne, but changed their policy to require a GUC, and had to reverse course after the outcry from frequent flyers. They're complementary again.
Given AA got rid of 500-mile-upgrades for the AS deal, I'm not sure how they'd make the current policy of auto-upgrading to J more onerous without making it worse than the other guys. Requiring a SWU would be worse than both. Going to PE would be clearly worse than DL and sort of worse than UA which at least lets you spend your way to J. I guess they could require spending miles or invent another upgrade instrument just for this, but that'd be kind of inconsistent w/other routes and doing anything drastically different would require coordinating reciprocity with AS.